Active since Japan invaded their homeland in 1931, Chinese American
women in San Francisco were well organized to lead their communities
in WWII. They raised funds for refugees, organized blood drives
and collected money for war bonds. Photo courtesy of San
Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

As growing numbers of men left for military service in the Second World
War, government, industry and civic organizations used patriotism, guilt
and the prospect of new opportunities and skills to recruit women to
the domestic war effort. Woman power was the critical weapon in FDR's
"Arsenal of Democracy," which was designed to overwhelm the enemy through
superior industrial output. Approximately 12 million women worked in
defense industries and support services across the Nation, including
shipyards, steel mills, foundries, warehouses, offices, hospitals and
daycare centers. Throughout the war, women from all backgrounds, and
from all over the country, worked at jobs such as welding, riveting
and operating cranes while maintaining their traditional duties as mothers
and homemakers.

No region demonstrated these social changes more than the West Coast
and the Bay Area, where women's contributions to the war efforts were
crucial. The war's enormous social, cultural and economic impacts on
women were most visible in the Western United States, which boasted
the highest percentage of female industrial workers in the country.
Women outnumbered men in the flood of migrants from the South and West
who sought Bay Area defense jobs. This was because of economic opportunities
associated with defense work, but also the number of women who relocated
to be near men in the region's numerous military facilities.

At the beginning of the war, U.S.
shipyards employed only 36 female production workers. By VJ Day,
Bay Area shipyards such as Richmond's Kaiser yards had forged
a multi-ethnic workforce of men and women. Photo from private collection

The Bay Area's numerous shipyards hired the greatest number of women
defense workers; towards the end of the war, 27 percent of Richmond's
shipyard workforce was women, and 20 percent of the Moore shipyard
in Oakland. Yet like most industries, Bay Area shipyards were reluctant
to hire women until labor shortages required it. Women put pressure
on defense plants for these well-paying jobs, including a demonstration
in front of the Boilermakers' union headquarters in San Francisco. While
doors ultimately opened wide to women in many defense factories, not
all were recruited as eagerly. African Americans were usually stuck
in lower-wage work once they landed a shipyard job, and were more likely
to find employment in canneries, railroads and military supply facilities,
which paid half of shipyard wages. Still the war moved many black women
out of domestic service--as one woman put it "Hitler was the one that
got us out of the kitchen."

Most women, regardless of ethnicity or race, also labored under the
"double burden" of responsibilities on the job and at home, made all
the more difficult by wartime shortages of goods, transportation, childcare
and housing. Women defense workers in the Bay Area were more often married
than single, and the largest shipyards estimated that up to half of
their female workforce had children at home. Most defense plants ran
around the clock, and many women worked a six-day week, leaving little
time to manage the myriad duties of home and family in their meager
"off" hours. For the thousands of women who migrated to the Pacific
Coast states, securing adequate housing in West Coast boomtowns was
a particularly difficult aspect of an already taxing new life. While
much of a woman's overburdened daily life went unremarked, aspects of
her duties were rephrased as weapons of the war effort. A woman's patriotic
role came to encompass much of her waking activity, from the victory
garden she tended, to the meals she planned to keep her family fit.
Rationing of foods and necessary household goods made daily housework
more arduous, while shopping for meals and clothing took on the air
of a strategic campaign as women swapped ration coupons and carefully
timed their purchases.

By 1944 San Francisco's MUNI streetcar system was enlisting African
American women to serve as conductors and "motormen." Photo courtesy of San
Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

Although "Rosie the Riveter," outfitted in overalls and wielding industrial
tools in a defense plant, was the most popular icon of the feminine
home front, women's contributions toward allied victory were defined
far more broadly than welding ships or riveting bombers. Women drove
cabs and delivered mail, they refurbished railroad cars to carry troops
and charted the positions of enemy aircraft. Bay Area women also volunteered
to support the war effort through a variety of activities and organizations.
They worked on war bond drives and "manned" civil defense programs.
They promoted community health programs through the Red Cross and entertained
troops at Canteens in public buildings that were rededicated to the
war effort, such as San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Native Son’s
Hall. Hollywood stars like Lena Horne sang for Richmond shipyard workers
and the Andrews Sisters entertained soldiers recovering at Oak Knoll
Hospital. Female staff at the Berkeley Public Library collected and
mailed 11,000 books to servicemen as part of the 1941 national "Victory
Book Campaign."

Existing women’s organizations like the YWCA regrouped their efforts
in support of home front mobilization; Oakland’s downtown “Y” converted
part if its handsome facility into dormitories for service women passing
through town, and offered an array of programs including dances for
servicemen, forums on "Women in War Production," and Red Cross first
aid classes. Newly-formed organizations such as American Women's Voluntary
Service enlisted members to drive ambulances, organize mobile kitchens,
administer first aid, watch fires and sell war bonds. While work in
defense factories was granted higher patriotic status, women's role
in boosting morale and organizing communities to cope with wartime problems
was deemed critical as well.

This Bay Area woman working on a
truck engine was one of tens of thousands who challenged common
notions about their capabilities during WWIIPhoto courtesy of Golden
Gate National Recreation Area, Park Archives and Records Center,
Interpretation Negative Collection

Forces in wartime drew people together and pushed them apart. Enormous
emphasis was put on preserving and strengthening family bonds as a refuge
from and bolster to the strains of wartime. Yet, at the same time, the
war disrupted traditional roles within many families. Job opportunities
and economic advances for women put intense strain on many Bay Area
marriages. Wives and children left behind by servicemen who embarked
from the Bay Area for the battlefront formed new household patterns,
often incorporating grandparents or friends in similar circumstances.
Women and teenage girls lived with far less scrutiny of their behavior
during the war, and anxiety about female sexuality became a public concern.
Females who flouted conventional morals were called "Victory Girls"
or "khacky-whackies" if they were thought to be on intimate terms with
enlisted men out of misguided patriotism.

Mothers and children were frequently used as symbols of what the war
was being fought to protect, yet they bore the brunt of social upheaval
on the home front. Bay Area schoolchildren were enthusiastically enlisted
into wartime activities, such as collecting scrap and buying Victory
Stamps, but they were also identified as particularly vulnerable victims
of wartime social changes. Outcry over "eight-hour orphans" accompanied
the remarkable development of Federal-local partnerships to provide
daycare for the first time to large numbers of working women. Communities
and businesses, like Richmond's Kaiser Shipyards, took advantage of
Federal Lanham Act funding to develop groundbreaking childcare programs.

Despite meager resources and brutal conditions at the Tanforan Assembly
center, Japanese American women found the energy and vision to organize
a preschool for children at the converted horse trackPhoto courtesy of San
Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

Although popular accounts stress the common bonds holding together
those who fought the "good war," the home front was also a place of
struggle and conflict. Women faced and fought discriminatory barriers,
such as exclusion from workplace unions, even as new opportunities were
presented to them. Women of color were met with added discrimination
and the incongruity of supporting a war "in defense of freedom" when
their own civic freedoms were circumscribed on a daily basis. Japanese
American women shared with their husbands, fathers and brothers the
wrenching experience of economic loss and of being uprooted from Bay
Area communities against their will when forced into relocation camps;
yet they shared with other home front women the responsibility of sustaining
a nourishing family life under adverse circumstances (for more information
see our Teaching with Historic Places lesson plan on The
War Relocation Centers of World War II). Sympathetic women in
Berkeley and San Francisco founded efforts to support those interned
and bring the conditions in which they lived to public attention. Their
work was labeled "unpatriotic" by some, as were women activists in Bay
Area pacifist organizations.

Although most women workers relied
on friends and relatives to care for their children, many placed
their youngsters in new childcare centers, such as this facility
in Richmond. Photo courtesy of Bancroft
Library

As the war wound down, public policy and rhetoric reversed support
for women's participation in the labor force. Women, especially women
of color, were the first let go by defense plants as government contracts
shut down. Arguments against female employment reached a deafening pitch
as government, labor unions and businesses worked to grant returning
vets priority status and to return gender and familial roles to their
prewar "norm." Yet, while many women welcomed the renewed emphasis on
their central role in the family, others were not so eager to reclaim
domestic responsibilities and prewar conditions. A survey by the U.S.
Department of Labor Women's Bureau found that 70 percent of Bay Area
women wanted to keep their jobs when peace prevailed, and although one-fifth
of working women were their family breadwinners, most found themselves
unemployed. The greater independence and opportunities women found during
wartime, and increased civil rights envisioned by people of color, meant
that the social landscape of the West would never be the same. Women,
both migrant and native to the Pacific Coast, did not just "live through"
this transformative period, but helped to shape the events and the dramatic
changes that left an indelible imprint on the West Coast.

Essay by Donna Graves. Graves is an historian and cultural planner
based in Berkeley. She served as Project Director for the Rosie the
Riveter Memorial.